Contents

Installing Arch Linux on a regular filesystem

1. Install Arch Linux to wherever you want with the default partition settings, select base-devel when selecting the packages to install, select syslinux as the bootloader, and boot into your new install.
2. Install some applications that we will be using:

# pacman -S git pbzip2

3. Installing the SPL/ZFS module

Install required packages (used by cower)

# pacman -S yajl

Make a temp dir in your home folder (You will probably want to keep the resulting binaries)

Compress the tarball with pbzip2 (dont use bzip2.. it will take a much longer time since it's single-threaded, use pbzip2 if you have a multithreaded system)

# pbzip2 arch-zfs.tar

Save this file somewhere because we will be moving it to our new installation afterwards (arch-zfs.tar.bz2)

New install with ZFS as the filesystem

In order to partition the system, I was using System Rescue CD v2.5.1. The reason I'm using 2.5.1 is because it's the last version that had the
native ZFS on Linux modules. Any version before or later does not have them. Since the link for 2.5.1 was removed from the author's website, I recommend you
to use the Gentoo Live DVD 2012. http://torrents.gentoo.org/ , download the `livedvd-amd64-multilib-2012.1`.

Note: If anyone knows of another live cd that like sysresccd that has the ZFS on Linux modules, definitely feel free to add it here

Partitioning

Our system will be using GPT as the base and extlinux as the bootloader.